“What happens to the data treasures that are created in
factories and when driving? The EU Commission answers the question - with major
consequences for customers and corporations.
Anyone who uses Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat knows that
the EU has lost the race to see who can use personal data commercially to the
American Internet companies. The planned new digital laws of the EU will hardly
change anything about this. It is all the more important for the European
Commission that this does not happen again with the important industrial data.
After all, there is enormous potential in the data in view of the increasing
networking of the economy (keyword Industry 4.0) and new offers such as
autonomous driving. In order to take advantage of this, the EU has to answer
one question: how can it ensure that the rapidly growing amount of data
generated by humans and machines alike does not lie around unused or is at most
used by a few large corporations?
The answer is to be provided by a new data law ("Data
Act"), which the Commission intends to present on February 23rd. A draft is available at the F.A.Z.
The EU authority wants to prevent manufacturers of
networked products, whether it's industrial plants, cars, language assistants
or smartwatches, from hoarding the data generated by users and not sharing it
with other companies. To this end, the EU authority wants to oblige the manufacturers to
make the data available to their users – private individuals and companies –
free of charge on request. But that's not all. The users should also be able to
pass on the data to third parties or authorize third parties to collect and use
the data - even if then for a "reasonable" fee to the manufacturer.
The weights on the market are being shifted
Car companies, medium-sized companies and, last but not
least, American Internet companies would be affected. These now also play a
major role in the market for connected products such as connected driving. The
car company Stellantis, to which Opel, Peugeot, Fiat and Chrysler belong, is
cooperating with Amazon.
To prevent the internet giants from using the law to
gain access to even more data, they are not allowed to access data from third
parties themselves. The law expressly excludes companies that fall under the
new EU law for digital markets (DMA), i.e. above all Google, Amazon, Facebook
and Apple. So the American Internet giants have to share their data, but they
themselves do not have access to the data of other European companies.
According to Brussels, if the Commission sticks to this
approach, it would be a revolution and likely to meet with strong resistance
from companies.
After all, the networked products would have to be designed in
the future in such a way that the data can be passed on smoothly, which means a
lot of work for the company. The proposal expressly excludes unnecessarily
complicated specifications and processes for retrieving the data. In addition,
the approach interferes with their business model because they can then no
longer use the data exclusively - especially since the protection of business
secrets should not prevent data transfer according to the draft. The parties
involved only have to ensure that these business secrets are adequately
protected. The weights on the market are being shifted. The manufacturers of networked
products can no longer contractually exclude third parties from taking over the
maintenance of industrial plants, for example.
Facilitate the change of cloud provider
However, there is an important limitation for the use of the
data. They may not be used to develop products that compete with those of the
manufacturers from which the shared data originated. Daimler could therefore
not be forced to pass on data collected from its autonomously driving cars to
BMW or VW if they then used the data to improve their own autonomously driving
cars. The Commission also wants to exempt small companies from the obligation
to pass on data, at least as long as they are not economically dependent on
other larger companies.
The law is also intended to make it easier for companies and
private individuals to switch from one cloud provider to another. According to
the reasoning in the draft law, the self-commitment of the cloud providers to
facilitate the change has not brought any dynamism to the market.
The
Commission therefore wants to oblige cloud providers such as Amazon's AWS,
Microsoft or Google to enable a technically and contractually smooth relocation
of data, software and applications.
In addition, the providers should take all
“reasonable technical, legal and organizational measures” to prevent non-EU
countries from gaining access to personal data if this violates European or
EU law. In order for the data law to come into force, both the European
Parliament and the EU states must agree to it.”
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